Sanne Glissov resides and works in the country side of South Zealand, Denmark.

Since her debut, 1994 at The Royal Danish Academy of Art, her work has been exhibited in DK, Europe and USA.

Sanne Glissov`s painting style references the Classicism of the Renaissance -  not a hopeful return to the celebratory rationalism of Raphael but a fragmented and displaced Classicism – a dislocation of Caravaggio.

Renaissance painters reflected the harmonious order that emerged from the Dark Ages with the development of a cohesive, single-point perspective. A perspective that presupposed God`s omniscience and one that put the viewer at the centre of the scene, emphasizing the fact that God creates Man in his own image.

Glissov also utilizes this perspective devise, particularly so in her paintings depicting the new cathedrals: the glass, steel and concrete spaces of corporate headquarters and airports ( the godless spaces of Philip Johnson`s classicized Minimalism).

In paintings such as Sound of Silence, Opus Magnum and As you like it, instead of creating harmony, Glissov shows how these spaces disturb their inhabitants`humanity. Like a zoo`s sterile closure in which polar bears endlessly rock back and forth, so these alien environments prove hazardous to mental health - and in the artist`s hands they become settings of insanity.

To protect themselves Glissov`s figures often reach for blankets to cover their heads, ward off the cultural toxins, such as in

The Cafe, The travel beween two chairs and Fellowship.

But again, these sheets may not be what they seem. Are they comforters or hospital sheets? Backdrops for posing life models, or shrouds for the dead? White sheets may cover, but they do not protect- we may feel safe in bed, but beneath the sheets we are naked. This is the connotation of Glissov`s white sheets : the expectation to expose. And it is made nowhere more clear than in Metamorphosis, where the romanticised painter dramatically pulls back a sheet to revael a fantastical but realist figure situated in a stark Euclidean space.

A more disturbing use of the sheets appears in The Human Race ( a sardonic comment on drive and progress) where the blankets perhaps becomes a blindfold, a hood or a symbol of material exsistence, blindly forward at all costs. Are those remains of consumerism in The seed or is this where rationalisme has brought us, Glissov asks? Perhaps, as Freud insisted, we are not conscious of our drives, and as a society we tend to mistake these sublimated desires for rational action. Glissov exposes this in the extratordinary Homesick, where a naked, tattooed man climbs a demure marble statue of the Virgin Mary. The artist powerfully plays the two dualities of fetishism and purity against each other, and asks where worshipful love and desire meet.

Startling as this image may be, even more captivating are those paintings where the Classicism turns viciously upon  humanity - devours it - such as can be seen in the haunting work, Do you not hear the deeper song?

This painting finds an inverse Animus, where the classical figuration breaks down and the model`s head becomes a monstrous, Goya-esque shadow.

There are many such hints at art-historical moments in Glissov`s work, from Classicism to Pop, from Romanticism to Minimalism, from Realism to Surrealism. These diverse references play upon art history`s oppositions, and create a metaphor for the wider dualities that have dominated philosophies throughout history. These traditional dualities are highlighted in - and are the real focus of - Glissov`s work. The point is that she presents them not as extremes that we measure ourselves against, but as two sides of the same coin :

extremes that are contained within each of us, and between whose poles we fluctuate and are torn.

                                                                                                                                                                         - David Barrett, Art Monthly

Selected Danish reviews:

Sanne Glissov er en af tidens mest spændende danske malere. Hun bruger samme teknik som de hollandske mestre og hendes motiver er evigt gyldige.

Det er på en måde klassiske billeder som Leonardo da Vinci kunne have malet dem hvis han havde fået hjælp af Salvator Dali.

De er foruroligende.

De fortæller om de roller vi vikler os ind i, om de mange lag vi består af, men de fortæller også om tiden, om deltagelse i krig, om integration af de fremmede, om tolerance og mangel på samme, om forståelse i stedet for had. 

                                                                                                                                                                       - Knud Jakobsen/Vestjydske tidende

Uanset om Glissov maler to mandlige forretningsfolk i en lufthavnsterminal, en halvnøgen sovende kvinde på en sofa eller en skikkelse stående et dramatisk gammel testamenteligt klippelandskab, er det tydeligt, at personen ikke er en aktiv deltager, men en passiv beskuer til denne verdens temmelige prosaiske hændelser. Dermed kommer der en form for ironi ind i det maleriske univers. Ikke den drengede, banale form for ironi, som herskede i kunstlivet for en 15-20 år siden, men en mere nøgtern, mere solidarisk form for ironi.

**Sanne Glissov`s malerier er i enhver henseende yderst moderne, rammende lige ned i vores tidsånd. 

                                                                                                                                                                                 - Tom Jørgensen/Kunstavisen     

Sanne Glissov`s overraskende malerier vækker for det første til nærmest åndeløs eftertanke og betager for det andet ved sin tekniske perfektion.     

                                                                                                                                                                                     -  Eva Muller/Kunstavisen                                                        

- If you could say it with words there is no reason to paint